We’re into the new year of 2015, into the middle part of January already. Winter has arrived in serious style. As I take some time to hammer out a note, some fresh snow has been shoveled. At least the temperature is mild, or feels that way, following a stretch of windy deep-freeze.

We’re almost a couple of weeks into the year and I have not written any kind of forecasts or anything else addressing what the new year will or will not be, or might be. This is the time of year when people can go off on making all kinds of broad generalizations, which, of course, is a broad generalization.

Anyway.

I thought it was interesting to find that the first weekend edition of 2015 of the TED Radio Hour show was about the theme of misconceptions, all about mistaken ideas and people finding that what they thought about something turns out to be not what it really is. That was a timely coincidence. We might be in a time now where the biggest theme is that we’re choking on widespread misconceptions that have become “common knowledge” that are not knowledge at all.

The new year started off with fairly quiet news about some sort of official ceremony “ending US combat operations in Afghanistan”, with that misadventure having been dragged out over 13 years. I was stunned to look at a newspaper a couple days ago and find a front page story saying that some poll reports that over half the Americans questioned said that they supported the idea of keeping US troops in Afghanistan. Why?

Another item popped up, about the ongoing clusterfuck farce of the US war business. This is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a jet fighter aircraft project supposedly intended to be some sort of bargain of multi-purpose efficiency as a new fighter plane for all the branches of the US military using fighter aircraft (Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps), serving the different requirements and specifications of all of them with a single plane, that apparently turns out to not really work for any of them.

Incidentally, as I understand it, that 1.5 trillion figure is said to be an estimate of the total cost of the entire program from start to finish, but who knows how that will eventually total up when it’s all done.

Stack all that up on top of the continuing situation in Ukraine, and the surrounding geopolitical nuttery. The outrageous twist to that tragic farce continues to be that as far as I can tell, the general public view of the scene is entirely what we’re told we’re supposed to think, played like a two dollar banjo. It’s much the same as around 2002 and 2003 when people were sold the pile of nonsense that got people to go along with invading Iraq, attacking another country, starting another war, based on fiction, just raw blatant lying.

I’m including a large batch of reading links in this edition, but I’ll throw the following pair in right here, just to add to the picture of what has been happening and continues to happen with the Ukraine epic.

Basically, the more that comes to light about the situation, the uglier it is. All kinds of elements of this running drama are not just ugly and just plain wrong on their own, but, even worse, they have the added problem of people not understanding them, because of the extra added ugliness of the way that what they’re told about it is so dramatically at odds with the reality involved, on damned near any part of it. All that has been discussed here over the past year, and while there are signs now and then that some people are paying attention and noticing all this, in general the American public memes about “the Ukraine Crisis” revolve around complete nonsense.

That’s the thing. There is possibly the most disturbing thing. It’s not just what has been happening. It’s the way we have been, and continue to be, simply lied to, so completely, continuously, about all of it. That’s real trouble when so many people have no idea, for whatever reason.

As we head into 2015, at least a hint of good news is that more and more people are waking up.